A Year's Worth of Longing
by evelynsteele
Summary: A simple -- by my definition -- one-shot between Hinata and my best friend Haruka. A request.


The raven-haired girl picked at her food, seemingly uninterested in eating, which was actually quite typical for her. The health foods that the academy had them on weren't the tastiest. They were filling without being heavy and filled the students with energy, which was the important part. The blonde next to her was eating the berries on her plate, though she was glaring at the "popular" crowd a few tables down from the two of them. She'd fallen asleep at a recent "fellowship gathering" and had awoken to neon red permanent dye in her hair. She'd have to wait for over three months for the dye to begin to fade, and she'd have blonde roots by then. One way or another, those preps were going down.

"D-d-don't give them the s-s-s-satisfaction of a reaction, Eevee," the raven-haired girl suggested, her near-white eyes focusing their attention on her now-redhead friend.

Eeevee, her proper name being Evelyn, nodded and lowered her ice-blue eyes to her plate. She'd absentmindedly picked away at everything, including that days' extremely spicy meat. She finished off her berries as she noticed that her friend was even quieter than normal.

"Okay, Hina. Spill," Evelyn demanded. "What's got you all hushed-up today?" She picked up a celery stick and bit into it. She then pointed the stick at her. "Don't say 'nothing,' either."

Hina, whose full name is Hinata, didn't say anything. She avoided Evelyn's eyes, too, which was unusual. Once, they had a three-way staring contest with their friend Haruka. At the thought of their friend, the redhead glanced over her shoulder to see Haruka having a rather animated conversation with their friend Linnea. She then returned her focus to her stuttering best friend.

"Come on, Hinata," she smiled. "You can trust me, you know that. I mean, look at all the things I've told you!" And with that -- and with a huge, sweeping hand motion -- she knocked her water bottle off the lunch table. "I think there's one thing that you would say that I would be uncomfortable with, and you know that just as well as I do."

" I-i-i do, Miss R-ruler," Hinata said, smiling slightly. Jokingly, some people call Evelyn "Ruler" simply because she refuses to look at her same gender in a romantic way. No one else is as adamant about it as she.

Evelyn ducked her head underneath the lunch table to see where her water bottle had fallen; however, it wasn't under their table. "Where's my water bottle?" she wondered aloud. At the same moment that Hinata pointed just above Evelyn's head, her water bottle was held in front of her face. She loosely gripped the bottom of the water bottle and tilted her head back, following the pale hand to the arm to the shoulder to the body of her boyfriend Sasori.

"Arigato," she smiled sweetly. With that, he released her water bottle and they shared a Spiderman-esque kiss. He then sat down next to her and wrapped a surprisingly warm arm around her waist. When his arm hit the exposed skin on the small of her back, she yelped slightly and slid his arm up a bit.

"Hinata?" she pressed. Her friend looked up from her plate to acknowledge her name being spoken, but nothing more. "Are you going to tell me?" Hinata defiantly shook her head. "Will you at least write it down?" Evelyn slid a napkin and one of her famous random Sharpies towards Hinata. It seemed as if she had finally cracked her shy best friend. Instead, it was a ciphered sentence.

"Y-y-you're number t-twelve in o-o-o-our class," Hinata teased as she stood up and slid her messenger bag onto her shoulder. "I'm sure that you'll figure it out. Sooner or later," she added before smiling, waving good-bye to both Evelyn and Sasori, and walking to her next class.

"Help me figure this out in Advisory?" Evelyn asked of her boyfriend, gesturing to the napkin. If it were only Hinata's curly script that stood between Evelyn and the answer to her question, it wouldn't matter. However, this message was obviously in a different language and ciphered, to boot.

"If you give me something in return," Sasori teased. Evelyn smiled and kissed Sasori gently. "I'll help you," Sasori said, giving his girlfriend one of his still rare smiles. The two of them stood up, grabbed their bags, and held hands as they walked to their Advisory class. They got permission to transfer their work down to the Library -- which, oddly, was rarely used -- and she pulled the only French-English dictionary off the shelf.

"French?" Sasori pondered.

"Hinata knows four languages: English, which this isn't; Japanese, which she only writes in kanji; German, which she has no idea how to spell; and French, which this must be," Evelyn answered. She glared angrily at the paper; nothing on that paper was even remotely close to being an actual French word. She thought of any codes that Hinata would have been able to use to quickly and couldn't think of any.

"Think," Evelyn commanded of herself aloud. "What coding have I used recently in class?" She ground her fists into her temples, demanding that her brain remember.

"The Caesar Cipher," Sasori offered. "Hinata loved that presentation because you were so awkward."

"Shut up," the natural blonde grumbled, blushing a crimson that wasn't far from her hair color. She definitely remembered the presentation that he was referring to; she had to tell about Julius Caesar's lovers. "What's the French alpabet?"

"Ah, bay, say, day, euh, eff, zhay, ash, ee, zhee, kah, ell, em, en, oh, pay, coo, err, ess, tay, oo, vay, doob-leh-vay, eeks, ee-grak, et zed," Sasori recited.

"You just said our alphabet," she pointed out.

"In French. We share the alphabet, just different pronunciation," he explained.

"You could have just said that," she groaned, writing out the alphabet on a piece of paper for easier decoding. Each pain-staking letter seemed to take an eternity to decode. Eventually, French words began to emerge. Only four words were on the paper in the end. Both redheads hunched over the paper and the male read it aloud.

"Je aimer la vache," Sasori read. "I know that it means 'I love the' something."

Evelyn flipped through the English-French dictionary, trying not to seem to want to know Hinata's secret so badly. Suddenly, Sasori slid Evelyn into his lap so they could both see the rather small dictionary. Evelyn simply responded with a squeak.

"Vache means cow," Evelyn finally read. "What on earth?" she whined. This wasn't like anything she was expecting.

"Another code?" Sasori guessed.

Evelyn nodded; it had to be another code. Liking a cow, whatever it meant literally, wasn't something that would bother Hinata so badly. Nothing immediate came to her mind, but she wouldn't give up until she figured it out. She flipped her side bangs out of her eyes, though a great majority immediately fell back into her line-of-sight. She placed "get a haircut" on her mental checklist for that weekend; it was finally Thursday! Without warning, Evelyn stood up. Sasori looked at her, seeming as if he was questioning her sanity for about the billionith time.

"There's no clock down here. Back to Kelsey-sensei we go!" she demanded, bolting out the door. Sasori searched around the room; indeed, there were no clocks, but five computers were lined up behind him, all of which were turned on and had clocks on the screensaver. There was something other than Evelyn's adamant fear of getting in trouble for not "checking in," as the teachers called it. Once the two redheads were seated in their regular advisory seats, and having already spoke with Kelsey-sensei, they pulled out something to work on, or rather appear to be working on. Evelyn tore a piece of paper out of what she called her "stuff notebook" and scrawled a simple message on it:

"The note returns. : )" She then slid it towards her best friend Haruka, who still had her natural blonde hair. Darn her.

"Indeed. What's up?" the note read when Evelyn received it again. When Sasori poised a pen like he was about to write something on the paper, Evelyn slid the paper into her lap and flicked his left hand, which held the pen.

"Have you asked anyone to the Valentine's Day Dance, yet?" she quickly jotted down before passing it back to Haruka. Their school had three dances: Homecoming, Valentine's Day, and the Junior/Senior Prom.

"Nope. Have someone I wanna ask, though. You better be going with Saso." Evelyn smiled; she was actually teasing her boyfriend and not asking him until they day of. And the Student Council had decided that, since the Prom is boys-choice, they'd make the Valentine's Day Dance girls-choice.

"Who, Haruuuu?" Just after she slid the paper to Haruka, something hit her. She slapped herself on the forehead; it was right there the entire time! Sasori raised one eyebrow, something that Evelyn had always wanted to be able to do, and leaned in, signaling that he wanted to know what she'd just realized.

"My nickname for Haruka is Haru, right?" Without any reply, the girl continued. "Haru is also the common nickname for Hatsuharu in Natsuki Takaya's manga series _Fruits Basket_. Hatsuharu is the cow in the Zodiac. Hinata likes Haruka!" All the pieces clicked together in the boy's mind as well. Hinata knew that Evelyn loved _Fruits Basket_ along with calling Haruka "Haru." Only Evelyn would have found the connection; after all, she was the only one who didn't call Haruka either "Haruka" or "Ruka."

"It makes sense, now," Sasori commented. Evelyn quickly locked her ice-blue eyes with the light eyes of Hinata; she made a motion to meet with her outside. They both got permission from Kelsey-sensei and met in the hall.

"Hinata!" Evelyn squealed in a hushed whisper. The redhead hugged the raven-haired girl. They stood like that for a moment, before both girls pulled away at the same time. "You like Haruka! I can't believe it! It's perfect!" Evelyn ran both her hands through her hair, smiling wildly.

"I-i-i just h-h-h-h-have no i-idea how to t-t-t-t-tell her," Hinata whispered back. "C-c-can you t-t-tell her?"

"That's something I know you can do on your own, Hina," Evelyn encouraged. As she spoke, Haruka walked into the hallway to see why the two best friends had disappeared from the study hall "class."

"Go get her, tiger," the redhead whispered before retreating back to the classroom. She quickly greeted Haruka with the noise that cats make that seems to come out as a question. Haruka smirked, muttering something about a "crazy Koneko-chan."

"What was that all about?" Haruka asked of Hinata, motioning towards Evelyn's path.

"Sh-sh-she was t-t-t-t-telling me that I sh-sh-sh-should tell you s-s-something," Hinata managed to get past her stumbeling lips.

"And what is that, Nata-chan?" the blonde asked with an every-so-slight tilt of the head.

"That I love you," Hinata said with the most confidence she had ever possessed.

"I love you, too," Haruka whispered. Quiet passion exploded when they kissed. For all they cared, Crawford-sensei could have walked right by them and they wouldn't have stopped. They only stopped for oxygen and only for a moment. They had a year's worth of longing to make up for.


End file.
